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Sharecropping and tenant farming arrangements used debt to secure white landlords generations of exploitable labor, ensuring Reconstruction would remain undone.

In 1955, her maternal great-grandfather acquired a little more than three acres of land in Apex; he ran a juke joint before building his home, a structure that weaves together her people’s story of tenant farming, entrepreneurship and homeownership.

African Americans working on such plantations after slavery were trapped in what was referred to as debt bondage, indentured labor, tenant farming, and sharecropping.

“African Americans have been subdued because we don’t control any natural resources,” he says, pointing out that black Americans have consistently been denied access to land ownership throughout U.S. history, first through slavery, then tenant farming, then redlining.

Besides their tenant farming, her parents ran a boardinghouse in Oceanside, Calif., which they were forced to abandon when their interment began.